Monday, December 10, 2012

But Is It Art?

The British Board of Film Classification has done a focus group or two, and now reports that, while "much of the public believe that sexual and sadistic violence are legitimate areas for film-makers to explore", some of the public also believe that sometimes they aren't. There is acute concern over the risk to "young men without much life experience and other vulnerable viewers", though it is not clear how many such people were included in the focus groups so that the extent of the risk could be assessed. There is worry about content which "could serve to normalise rape and other forms of violence and offer a distorted view of women" in people who regard, say, The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence) as a DIY documentary or a guide to sexual etiquette. Again, it is regrettably unclear how many such interesting folk exist in the general population, let alone in the BBFC's "carefully selected" focus groups. In any event, the Board's director has concluded that there are some things which aggravate a theme and others which mitigate it, and that drawing out and applying these aggravations and mitigations is helpful in arriving at a decision as to whether to classify in a censorious manner. In Standard English, this presumably means that the morally invulnerable adults at the BBFC will continue to exercise their little whims.